Newsgiving Awards Ceremony!

Before we start, allow us to say that while we strive to acknowledge all of your efforts, we sincerely apologize to any deserving projects, builders, or ecosystem agents that we may have overlooked.

The Award for Artistic Achievements

Let’s get the footballz rolling with the NFT and Gaming category. In third place, put on your lootin’ boots, because it’s Evrloot. We’re expecting even bigger things from them in 2025 with the imminent launch of V1 and a massively oversubscribed waitlist for their second NFT collection drop.

Our runner-up brought the big ballz and awesome avatars this year, it’s Ajuna. After a successful migration of Big Ballz of Bajun (BBB) from Bajun to the Ajuna network, and Awesome Ajuna Avatars (AAA) next, we’re eagerly anticipating the launch of their flagship game Battle Mogs next year.

No stranger to AAA titles, first prize goes to Mythical. They made headlines earlier this year with their massive Polkadot migration, also serving as a pre-Spammening stress test of the network.

With the migration complete, they have brought 800k additional accounts to the Polkadot ecosystem already. However, with 2025 seeing the launch of Pudgy Penguins Party, FIFA Rivals, and at least five titles from external developers building on Mythos, the party is just getting started.

Last but not least, an honorable mention goes to KodaDot for their support of the arts. They have onboarded over 160 artists to the Polkadot ecosystem, and have built a thriving community of generative art collectors.

Awarding the Legends of Liquidity

With two major treasury-funded liquidity campaigns this year, Polkadot DeFi protocols received a healthy boost to their TVLs. Our third-place recipient, Stellaswap, got an additional boost from Moonbeam Season 3 Rewards.

As a result, some LP pools are receiving triple rewards of DOT, GLMR, and STELLA. The advantage of Stellaswap is that they offer concentrated liquidity pools, meaning that if you are willing to take on additional risk, you can benefit from even higher APRs.

In second place, we have Bifrost, which just this week announced breaking through the USD $100M TVL milestone. As they continue to make WAVEs over the festive season, they plan to buy back and burn their way through the new year while sharing profits with their loyal holders.

Meanwhile, our first-place recipient has plenty of liquidity to put out those flames. The winner is Hydration, which made some massive developments this year. With swaps and lending ticked off the list, the holy trinity of Polkadot DeFi is soon to be completed with the launch of the HOLLAR stablecoin.

The DeFi special mention goes to Polkadex. They recently underwent major restructuring, and have just dropped the exciting announcement that they will be forfeiting their parachain slot and integrating into Hyperbridge. Stay tuned to see what massive cross-chain possibilities they unlock in the coming year.

The Award for Engagement with the Outside World

Bridging has made some massive strides on Polkadot in 2024, with not one but two trustless solutions launching. Both are our joint runners-up for the category, Snowbridge and Hyperbridge.

However, with a 2023 launch giving them a head start, the top prize goes to Moonbeam Routed Liquidity (MRL). In Q3 2024, Moonbeam surpassed the massive milestone of USD $30M of liquidity passed through MRL.

The Enterprise Engagement Excellence Award

There are three exemplary projects in the category of enterprise engagement. Third place goes to KILT, whose collaboration with Deloitte is helping to facilitate external institutional investment. In second place we have Energy Web, which is helping businesses to navigate the clean energy transition.

First place goes to enterprise blockchain solution provider Aventus. In breaking news, they have just announced the launch of the Blockchain Factory, a streamlined enterprise blockchain platform that promises deployment in as little as two weeks.

Top Transactors

1. Phala – 148,478 daily transactions
2. Neuroweb – 118,167 daily transactions.
3. Frequency – 104,772 daily transactions.

(Source: Messari - State of Polkadot 2024 – Q1, Q2, Q3)

The Parachain Popularity Contest

1. Moonbeam – 2180 daily active users.
2. Hydration – 831 daily active users.
3. Acala – 615 daily active users.

(Source: Token Terminal - Polkadot | Ecosystem dashboard November 26th 2024)

The Community Culture Award

1. Gavun Wud
2. Stink
3. Pink

(Source: DEXScreener - Polkadot Trending Tokens November 26th 2024)

The Golden Croissant Award for the Best Ecosystem Event

In third place, we have the Web3 Summit. While this event doesn’t belong to a particular ecosystem per se, it did feature the famous keynote from Gavin Wood, where he suggested we get tattooed as on-chain proof of our digital citizenship.

Polkadot Decoded in Belgium takes the second prize. This was the event where the Polkadot App featuring Polkadot Pay, Nova Wallet Mastercards, and some great funding initiatives were announced. While the food situation wasn’t the best, no one went thirsty thanks to ChaosDAO.

The undisputed winner for best Polkadot ecosystem event of 2024 has to be the Sub0 Reset in Bangkok. The food, the parties, the speakers, and the vibe were all impeccable. It was arguably a turning point for the Polkadot community, as the optimistic spirit has been on an upward trajectory ever since.

The 1337est n00b Award

In the Polkadot 2.0 era, the barriers for projects to enter the ecosystem are a lot lower. With parachain auctions a thing of the past, and affordable coretime available to all, we may see a lot more newcomers by this time next year.

While they are both new to the Polkadot mainnet, our joint winners for the top newcomer both have a long history. Firstly, we have Peaq, which have just successfully launched its rollup optimized for DePIN projects. Our second winner is Mythical, which have shown the true potential of blockchain abstraction for onboarding Web2 users.

Honorable mentions go to Polimec, Mandala, and Acurast. Their Polkadot projects are only just getting off the ground, but we’re excited to see what 2025 brings for them.

The Tools of the Trade Trophies

In the category of wallets there are three standouts. In third place is Talisman, whose open-source, browser-based wallet supports Substrate and EVM chains and cross-chain swaps.

Subwallet takes the second prize with their flexible offering that is supported on both browser and mobile. They are also one of the first to offer an integrated crypto-to-fiat solution.

First prize goes to Nova Wallet, whose mobile wallet offers the best Polkadot user experience. Highlights for this year include Hydration integration for in-app swaps, intuitive governance enhancements, and the upcoming release of the Nova Wallet Mastercard and Polkadot Pay.

Special mentions in the governance category go to Polkassembly and SubSquare, which both offer user-friendly solutions for individual voting, delegated voting, and submitting proposals.

The community tooling honorable mention goes to SubSocial, which helps creators in the Polkadot ecosystem and beyond to monetize their content.

In the special category of DAO tooling, an honorable mention goes to InvArch. Their suite of DAO management tools have been a long time in the making, and the imminent launch of InvArch v1.0.0 has got us Youdling from the hilltops.

Finally, an honorable mention for tooling support goes to Astar, whose dApp staking program offers financial support to builders across the ecosystem.

The Polkadot Gigabrain Honors List

This special category honors the great minds of Polkadot who have played key roles in the development of the protocol this year.

The first award, for his work on the technical specification of JAM, the next major iteration of Polkadot, goes to our founder and chief architect, Gavin Wood. Announced publicly for the first time at Sub0 Asia in March this year, JAM is a grand vision for Polkadot to become a trustless supercomputer, forming the basis of the Web3 Cloud.

For starting the conversation about DOT inflation, and seeing it through to completion, the next award goes to Jonas Gehrlein. Thanks to Jonas, Polkadot now has a linear model of inflation that will decrease each year, and a fixed treasury income.

While many are not always sure exactly what he’s doing, a special mention goes to Bastian Köcher for showing the parachains how it's done. His demonstration of 500ms parachain block times using Async Backing blew some minds and earned him a very special fan.

While JAM is set to revolutionize Polkadot, it’s important to recognize that we already have a highly resilient and marketable blockchain. Our final two recipients played a role in two key concepts that fully encompass the idea of Polkadot that we want to market today.

For his proposal that led to the concept of the Polkadot Hub, the next individual award goes to Joe Petrowski. Originally called the Polkadot Plaza, the Polkadot Hub transforms Asset Hub into a familiar and accessible landing pad for new developers and users.

Another concept that has captured the mindshare of the Polkadot community is the Polkadot Cloud, which encapsulates all of the present-day possibilities of Polkadot services into a highly marketable blockchain offering. For his work to build and spread the message, a special mention goes to Shawn Tabrizi.

To Our Special Saviors

While there’s safety in numbers, a round of thanks goes to Polkadot’s additional safety layers. This week’s Spammening trial run on Kusama demonstrated once again the benefits of having a fully functional canary network. While nothing went majorly wrong this time, thanks to Kusama, we didn’t risk sacrificing Polkadot’s unblemished uptime record to find out.

Finally, thank you to the Polkadot Technical Fellowship. We are grateful for your expertise and commitment to ensuring the security and resilience of the network.

Last But Not Least, Thanks to Our Community Crusaders…

While the developers above are working hard to build the next generation of Web3 infrastructure, it comes down to the rest of the community to spread the good word, helping to build engagement and adoption. So, in no particular order, let’s give thanks to our community advocates.

Thank you for spreading the Polkadot message beyond the Anglosphere, AIweb3, Polkaworld, and Dotcast.

For insightful infographics and daily updates, thank you to Polkadot Insider and Polkadot ERI.

Thanks to The Dots for using the power of memes to entertain and engage the community.

ChaosDAO, thank you for your contributions to governance, especially the free beer.

For protecting the treasury, thank you to OG Tracker and OpenGov.Watch.

A big thanks to Alice und Bob for everything you do for the ecosystem, especially defining Polkadot 2.0.

Thank you Conor Daly for going above and beyond with your sponsorship, we hope you’ll stick around.

The Kus, thank you for the comprehensive, impartial, and engaging blanket coverage of the entire Polkadot ecosystem.

Finally, for doing all of the above while incubating the next generation of Polkadot ecosystem agents, thank you WagMedia.

Wishing you all the best for the festive season, and looking forward to catching up next year.